Planning for housing: Unravelling the frictions in local practice

The Planning Green Paper (Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions (DTLR), 2001) and subsequent Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill (HM Government, 2002)—becoming a Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act in 2004—promise the most radical overhaul of the British planning system for more than half a century. Besides dealing with specific matters—such as the future form of development plans—the government’s approach is to address what it sees as endemic weaknesses in the present planning system. The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) has committed itself to a programme of reform that aims to combat the charge that the current planning system is slow, uncertain, lacks transparency and is generally uncreative. Such charges have been regularly levelled at the planning service for a number of years. The Nolan Committee on standards in public life (Committee on Standards in Public Life, 1997), for example, painted a picture of a system unable to win the trust of local voters, largely because policy gives the impression that planning permissions can be bought and sold (see also Campbell et al., 2001). In 2000, the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI)—together with the Housing Corporation, the DTLR, the National Housing Federation and the House Builders Federation—pre-empted the current concerns and commissioned its own research into how these problems impact on local house building in England. This research sought: